In Rome—
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Bifurcations in Rome:
Latin Epics and the Pentateuch
If, as secular scholars contend, the Pentateuch was the work not of Moses but of
redactors following (and mourning) the deline of the Solomonic empire, then the age
of the dissolving Roman empire had much in common with the books' origin. Because
we know so much more about that late Roman period, it thus may serve as a perspective
for viewing the Pentareuch. I say "viewing" because unlike that earlier
period, the late Roman empire was a time when literacy and its related visual orientation
was a shade more common, so that the Roman perspective serves as an illuminating
contrast to as well as comparison with post-Solomonic Jerusalem.
Indirectly expressing the ambience of falling empire, Augustine, in his De Civitate Dei (410 C.E), described human destiny as divided between two cities. Both were versions of Rome. The first of his “cities,” a terrestrial one, was scarcely enduring the Vandals. A part of the former (yet apart from it), the second, a celestial “city”—an idealized version of Rome at its height— sojourned on earth in the person of Christians.
What was relatively new, however, in his metaphor was his extreme aversion to worldly disorder—even more than in Genesis where fall equals exile from one part of the earth to another (rather than dissociation from it in order to earn another world). Certainly, in the L3 of the Roman Republic and Empire, sacred perfection and secular messiness were complementary. Not merely earthly but earthy, Rome had thronged with slaves, luxury, and squalor; simultaneously, it treasured philosophical and holy manuscripts. The collection with which Aristotle founded the Athenian academy arrived along with volumes from countless royal troves (Thompson 1940: 30). Sacred writings from around the Hellenistic world adorned three thousand temples (Richardson 1914: 206-07).
Bifurcations within bifurcations might be discovered within these manuscripts, mirroring the order/disorder dyad on countless levels, but consider one so subtle that, at first, it may not seem an instance of it: their offering a binary choice between languages. Associated with past glory and the idealism of classic art and philosophy, Greek (whatever it may have been in Attica) was in Rome a harbinger of order, detached from the sordid present. Any Roman who knew the alphabet could read Latin, at least of those authors using a near vernacular such as Julius Caesar. Greek, though, was not only a foreign language, but, in its classic form, a senescent one, half a millennium removed from the untidy Roman zenith. Nonetheless, the two tongues coexisted.
The chief library, the Ulpian, consisted of double edifices: one for Greek, one for Latin (Burnell 78). A gigantic, stone parchment divided these as a “curia” did for the similar depositories of the great Octavian quadrangle (Burnell 78). Those buildings’ basic form (separate collections of Greek and Latin) characterized the other major libraries of the city, which eventually numbered twenty-eight (Richardson 1914: 204). Within the Apollonine, the Roman senate occasionally met in the hall connecting the two depositories, as if to situate their deliberations between more recent and more remote funds of knowledge (Richarson 1914: 209). Even the public baths and the mansions of the wealthy maintained large holdings, divided into the characteristic Greek and Latin sections. (In its bilingualism, Rome was far from unique. Other ancient civilizations coupled a frozen classical or sacred tongue with an inherently more-disorderly later one. For instance, Sumerian was preserved among Babylonians, Hattic among Hittites, Sanskrit among speakers of the Indian vernaculars, Hebrew among Alexandria’s Greek—speaking Jews and Jerusalem’s Aramaic—speaking ones.) Hamurapi chose to to have his code (a pradigm for Law throughout the Middle East) inscribed in archaic writing to make it seem to come from the past, a tradition or divine fiat. (Gordon, 66).
In contrast to Roman bilingualism, the typical American library or bookstore has been almost entirely English—language with only a seasoning of other tongues. Ever so gradually, during the late empire, a similar trend won eventually (Thompson 40). Then, during Medieval Europe, Latin became the sacred language, coexisting with a vernacular in each region.
What pattern underlies these facts? Made possible by widespread
training in writing (which promotes articulate rationalism), some periods assume
that all knowledge can be expressed in a single tongue, i.e., made wholly conscious.
Other periods opt for two languages, as if the vernacular of consciousness must be
supplemented with a more obscure and older language, linked to magic and myth–in
a sense, a voice of the unconscious, a place to seek transcendent order and archetypal
wisdom. Our own day seems to be a time of transition with both trends contending
with one another. As a language of science and commerce, English is in fact spreading
across the globe. The most obvious contrast to this is the Moslem world, where resurgent
fundamentalism promotes the study of sixth-century Arabic (for the Koran) along with
each current vernacular.
These two trends have contrasting assumptions. Despite himself being a polyglot,
Elias Canetti (speaking for literacy) wrote:
|
The fact that there are different languages is the most sinister fact in the world. It means that there are different names for the same things; and one would have to doubt that they are the same things. All linguistics hides the striving to reduce all languages to one. The tale of the Tower of Babel is the tale of the second Fall of Man…. God’s deed was the most diabolical ever committed –Canetti 1978, 7). |
His point of view differs from the ancient Roman because of the
changing nature of reading. Canetti was a Nobel-Prize-winning author, his standard
of unity shaped by conventions of modern literature, whose silent readers may page
back and forth, checking consistency. Ancient literature, however, was still almost
always declaimed aloud, with audiences unsure whether mistakes belonged to the scrolls
or their ears. Like oral narratives (which it often preserved or imitated), ancient
writing depended heavily on synonymous words and expressions to say twice what might
be missed if given only once. Thus, “the same things” would usually have more than
one name, even in a single tongue, e.g., “O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
[‘aph]/or discipline me in your wrath [.h—e m—ah]” (Psalms 6:1).
Complementary opposites served much the same purpose, for hearing the phrase “… and
earth” the reader would surmise that the previous word was “heaven.” It was an age
where everything had its reflection or shadow.
The poetry of the Hebrew Bible, Christened and turned to Greek and Latin, eventually
conquered Rome, its translation made the easier by its pairings–rhymes of thought
as they have sometimes been called, rather than untranslatable ones of sound. In
their universality, they resembled “[strange] attractors[, which] guarantee translatability
from one culture to another, because they tend to be globally isomorphic” (Argyros
299). In the Hebrew original, pairings were even more useful than in orality. Writing
without vowels created a great need for some way to distinguish words given only
by their consonants. To some extent, however, a highly rhetorical style of paired
expressions pervaded manuscript culture.
Where the contrast was not antithesis but subtle variation, it represented a taste
especially different from Canetti’s. To him, having two forms of expression was disorienting.
It was like seeing double. In the less—predominantly visual world of orality and
texts read aloud, however, having synonyms or even two languages was like hearing
twice or perceiving with two different senses. It could even be reassuring if one
ignored discrepancies–precisely what orality trains one to do. “In a study by Hildyard
and Olson (1978) [corroborating and extending that by L. Walker (1977)] … [silent]
reading tended to bias comprehension toward verbatim information explicit in the
text, and listening, toward the gist of the story” (Taylor and Taylor 3). Even in
reading, the details best remembered are those closest in form to orality: “Recognition
memory was nearly twice as good for sentences in the oral style than in the literate
style.…” (Long and Graesser 107).
Orality and manuscript cultures could have easily reduced the joggle between approximations
by employing the same word twice. Today, modems depend on exact redundancy as a check
against “noise.” Roman Imperial culture, however, appreciated the nuanced corroboration
afforded by Latin and Greek, e.g., encountering Jupiter and Zeus, with almost the
same myths, inculcating almost the same values. Given the mind—set, the approximateness
was not disturbing, but an elegant variation.
Attributing discovery of dichotomies to Heraclitus and Moses, Philo mentions “the
man created after the image and the man fashioned out of the clay, Cain and Abel,
the two Enochs, Sarah and Hagar, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Moses and Aaron,
the speech of the beloved and that of the hated woman, the libation of the high—priest—Logos
and the wine of folly, ecstatic and material drunkenness, pure and unclean animals,
flesh and spirit….” These are various tropes for the disorderly versus the orderly
(Laports 133). If one considers contemporary tension between Hebrews and Hellenes,
his ascribing discovery of antinomies to a member of each is yet another complementary
pairing.
In orality and writing meant to be read aloud (what one might call “loud literacy”),
paired images included the binary patternings so often remarked in myth. Among those,
David Bynum discovered the organization of narratives into contrasting pairs of formulae,
such as the “Two Tree pattern,” where “notions of … unpredictable danger” (i.e.,
the perilous present) associate with a green tree and “ideas of unification” (i.e.,
the idealized past) with a dry one (Bynum 11-18). Greek and Latin, heaven and earth,
dry tree and green tree, wisdom of the ancestors and problems of the present–these
analogous dichotomies resemble one theory of intellection itself.
The chaologist Matti Bergström argues that thought arises
only through the interaction of (chaotic) accurate memories and (too orderly) stereotyped
ones Briggs and Peat 168). Although he has the cortex as the orderer and the limbic
system and stem as sites of cognitive dissonance, his duality sounds rather like
early versions of dual hemisphere theories. For the human brain, or even for postmodern
culture, the interweaving of order and disorder is likely to be far more complex.
In manuscript culture, however, stark duality is the extreme case that defines many
of the subtler instances. Traditional or transcendent order couples with a less tranquil
present (as if in the hope that the earthly can be made to seem a mirror of the classic
or heavenly).
A widespread pattern is assignment of the same events to a king and a deity. Inscriptions
found at Urartu, for instance, ascribe many victories first to a god and then to
the monarch (Kitchen 117). Similarly, an Assyrian bas relief of the fifth—century
B.C.E. depicts a king and his protective god posed as doubles, the latter hovering
above the former, both holding bows in the same position (Cohn 42). The underlying
pattern is a hendiadys: god and king. That phrase almost equals a divine king–but
not quite. The copula (or in pictures, the portrayal of them separately) acknowledges
a difference between these attractors, who personify perfection and its (mere) imitation,
respectively.
Faced with dichotomies, deconstruction exposes them to be covert hierarchies. Gods
are above men, green trees above dry ones, order above chaos. Then, deconstruction
pretends to be surprised that these hierarchies are easily overturned (e.g., instead
of being created by gods, the men create the latter). This trick is unnecessary.
Even in L3, which was ready to fight for it, there never was a clear hierarchy. The
beautiful green tree is chaotic, the arid one a timeless mummy.
Strange attractors may attract, then repel. Chaological charting may bifurcate between
poles, but each time with a new path. A culture’s basic images are mapped on these
poles in more than one way. The gods are law—givers and mischief—makers; writing
is on stone and on the shuffling leaves of the Sybil.
The Way of Revision
Despite being otherwise quite different, the Pentateuch and Roman epics had a
similar development. In legends (probably oral in origin), Rome’s ancestor, the Trojan
prince Aeneas, rescued his people from the Greeks as Moses extricated his from the
Egyptians. Due to later Roman memory of the Punic Wars (264—241, 218—201, and 149—146
B.C.E), Virgil wrote of Aeneas’s fleeing Carthaginians as well as Greeks. A similar
updating may have occurred in the Pentateuch. Modern scholarship suggests that it
was revised and edited until after the Babylonian captivity (597—538 B.C.E). Perhaps
for that reason in Genesis, the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates supplements Egypt
as a symbol of egress (e.g., exile from Eden by the Tigris (2.14), dispersal from
Babel, and Abram’s departure from Ur). By the time Rome reached its height, “Babylon”
had become the Jewish code word for Rome as the Jews scoured their scriptures for
prophecies of release from that city as well. The legends are partly fugitive, records
of wandering away from disorder; they are also about attraction–Israelites moving
toward the ideal order of Canaan or Trojans toward that of Rome. Like a strange attractor
(“the shape that any initial set of points will approach asymptotically”), Pentateuch
and Aeneid tell of wandering unterminated as they close (Kellert 14).
Comparing the Pentateuch with Latin epics constitutes a reading of the core of the
Bible as if by an early convert in Rome. Although, as the above suggests, most of
the Pentateuch (Exodus through Deuteronomy) has analogies with the Aeneid,
the Hebrew Bible’s great prelude, Genesis, resembles in subject that other major
Augustan epic Metamorphoses. Consequently, that is a place to begin in charting
the revision of binary patterns from oral to written myths.
One point where Ovid most explicitly comments on the relationship of orality and
literacy is in his tale of Byblis’s literary revisions. Torn between the deranging
power of lust and the restraining one of shame, she composes a love letter to her
brother (Ovidii Nasonis 286). “She began, and hesitated: wrote, and found fault with
what she had written, set down a word and then erased it, changed what she had said,
blamed it or praised it, alternately laid aside the tablets, and picked them up again”
(Innes 217). She ends her vacillation by regretting that she had not simply talked
to him: “I should first have found out his feelings, by talking to him in a way that
committed me to nothing” (Innes 219). Orality still exists, but now that writing
does as well, she finds herself pulled toward its definiteness, only to be thrown
back into confusion again. She is Byblis, eponym for that Phoenician city after which
Greeks named books and eventually the Bible itself. She and her brother, though,
are of divine descent, from the self—reflexive river Meander, “whose course winds
back so often upon itself” (Innes 215). That clause prefigures Byblis’s desire to
make the genealogical line also bend back upon itself. Unable to move into the new
order of law and literacy, she retreats into fluidity and chaos by changing into
a natural fountain.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, her plight is exemplary of oscillation between linguistic order and disorder that underlies that epic, whose strata involve the old oral myths, their Greek transformation to classic literature, and, at the surface, Ovid’s racier, more conversational Latin. He begins by praising an anarchic Golden Age: “There were no penalties to be afraid of, no bronze tablets were erected, carrying threats of legal action…” (Innes 31). His nostalgia for this amoral/oral chaos counterpoints the epic’s stopping at the apotheosis of Julius Caesar, harbinger of Imperial order–though, so rambling a work might best be said to pause rather than conclude there. In drawing on a vast mythology of change, Ovid must polish it into the precision growing literacy requires, yet what fascinates him is the old anomie, typified in tales of anything changed to anything else.
As so often in ancient literature, Ovid’s tension between order
and disorder has, as its prime example, the nature of mankind. “[E]ither the Creator,
who was responsible for this better world, made him from divine seed, or else Prometheus,
son of Iapetus, took the new—made earth which … still retained some elements related
to those of heaven [semina caeli] and … fashioned it into the image
of the all—governing gods” (Innes 31). Ovid tries to harmonize these options by adding
some semina caeli to the mud and shaping it in the image(s) of gods, but ultimately
he must write or. Humanity comes either entirely from the divine semen or
not. Literate logic requires Ovid to recognize a difference between humanity’s being
of celestial or of terrestrial origin, yet he is processing traditions that combine
the two. On the one hand, throughout the Old World, myths connect mankind to the
earth: “In Egypt, either the God Khnum or the God Ptah created man on a potter’s
wheel; in Babylonia, either the Goddess Aruru or the God Ea kneaded man from clay.
According to a Phocian Greek myth, Prometheus used a certain red clay at Panopeus;
what was left there continued for centuries to exude an odour of human flesh” (Graves
and Patai 63). On the other hand, these lands also have tales of divinely sired mortals.
The latter theme enters Genesis in terms of the sons of God who see the daughters
of man (6.2). The celestial/terrestrial dichotomy, however, exists even in the contrast
between the untroubled creation of Genesis 1 (in the divine image) and the tragic
creation in Genesis 2, where man is not only fashioned from earth but where the very
words Adam (man) and adama (earth) relate punningly. A single Indo—European
root yielded in Greek chthon (earth) and epichthonios (human) as well,
in Latin, homo (man) and humus (earth). Comparable metaphors include
humanity as quarried, e.g., Isaiah 51.1, “look unto the rock whence ye are hewn.”
Ovid’s myths show humanity as swaying between godliness and earthiness. In Metamorphoses,
heroes have divine blood at war with a terrestrial birth. Characters repeatedly turn
from earth or stone to human (e.g., Pygmalion’s statue and the re—creation from stones
immediately after the flood) or from human to stone (e.g., Aglauros, the victims
of Medusa, and the daughters of Propoetus). In the mysteries of his time or in Virgil’s
Georgics 2:49, each side represents a potential, though the divine is too
dangerous for the majority.
Like Ovid, Virgil makes definite distinction between the opposites.
In that respect, Virgil and Ovid are like, for instance, the equally late Latin Asclepius.
It employs the literate device of calling attention to human doubleness, thus, anticipating
and disarming any objections of self-—contradiction: “indeed, humanity is the only
double animal” (solum enim animal homo duplex est, Lat. Ascl. 7. See also
Dodd 26—27.). Both Ovid and Virgil were thus teaching a literate approach to myth
so that educated Christians–those likely to attain prominence in the Church–brought
their progress into L4 with them even when reading works relatively close
to orality such as Genesis. Indeed, the esteem of the Bible among Christians accelerated
study of it, thereby promoting L4 habits of thought.
Copulative Conjunctions
Robert Alter notes that with few exceptions, Biblical style presents two characters
at a time, in a “technique of contrastive dialogue” (72). Psychologically considered,
such figures may be alter egos, images of dialectic within a single self. This dialogic
often leaves the choice between alternatives (bifurcation) to the reader. Thus, the
copulative conjunction v’ spliced together much of the Pentateuch (where moderns
would expect subordinating conjunctions to define relationships such as that between
human and divine). The tendency toward couplets in Hebrew verse is so pronounced
that the Biblical scholar Georg Fohrer has voluminously championed the idea that
tercets never occurred in the original; thus their appearance evidence textual corruption,
e.g., Georg Fohrer, Das Buch Hiob. Kommentar zum Alten Testament, No. 16.
Gütersloh, 1963. His contention is neither provable nor disprovable, but, at
least, it testifies to the fact that binary arrangement is the general rule.
In societies held together by blood, ancients became accustomed to the idea of pairings
as often genealogical. For instance, “begat” ties together long sections of the Bible,
and Genesis 2.4 describes the genealogy (toledot) of “heaven and earth” as
if God had begotten that dysfunctional pair. Common to a number of ancient languages,
such as Hebrew, Babylonian, Greek, and Latin, the word “know” could mean have sex
(Born1290). This epistemology continued vestigially in the occult tradition as in
the Hermetic tractate “Asclepius,” where “The mystery experience… is likened to sexual
intercourse.…: (Robinson 330). In terms of the underlying metaphor, comprehension
is a multi-sensory participation in an experience of conjunction, an intermarriage.
Contrasted with the later epistemology of classical science, the earlier one was
dynamic, multi—level, holistic, i.e., more in spirit with post—classical science,
e.g., the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and chaos theory.
Nonetheless, in the Roman Empire, demand for clear—cut order (a
Canetti—like literalism and reductivism) was slowly arising through familiarity with
that potentially very precise tool–writing. Since differences of perspective had
more to do with individual exposure to literacy, the two sensibilities long coexisted,
yet understood words in contrasting manners. Take, for instance, interpretation of
parallel phrases in Zechariah 9.9:
| Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter
of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he [is] just, and having salvation;
lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. The style is traditional. Perhaps because the Septuagint already slightly obscures the parallelism, Matthew 21.2—4 interprets the verse thus: [Jesus said] unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose [them], and bring [them] unto me. And if any [man] say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them. All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. |
So, according to Matthew, Jesus simultaneously rode two animals into Jerusalem. (Note
how Zechariah’s other pairings have been deleted from Matthew.) Read traditionally,
Zechariah indicates only one ass as there is only one daughter of Zion/Jerusalem.
The difference between the mountain Zion and the disorderly city beneath it perhaps
connote two aspects of the daughter but not that she is literally two. Comparable
to Matthew, the section of Midrash Shohar Tov on Psalm 43, interprets “Send your
light and your truth” (43.3) as referring to Elijah and the Messiah respectively.
(According to Herbert W. Basser, this is the probable source of the Transfiguration
in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which shares with it a number of images including a mountain
and tents.) (Basser 30-35). The rules of reading were changing: instead of each image
being accompanied by a resonance, reflection, or shadow, the words were changed to
exact diagrams.
Continue to Gen 1-3
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